FROM
THE PRESIDENT
What we fight when we fight against ignorance
We
have two enemies: suffering and ignorance. With these words, the
University's Dr. Kurt Hecox described the motive force of his
work in pediatric neurology, particularly his work on epilepsy
in children. Guess what fields are central to his work. Among
others, physics and computer science. His work is but one example
of the special ways in which Chicago is engaged in the war against
suffering and ignorance. At the heart of that war is a commitment
to the notion that the war against suffering will ultimately be
won only if the war against ignorance is won as well.
Our
structure embodies this principle in a unique way. Here the Pritzker
School of Medicine is embedded in the Biological Sciences Division.
And the division's faculty simultaneously fights in the University
Hospitals the war against suffering and in their laboratories
the war against ignorance. This structure greatly speeds the rate
at which the victories in the war against ignorance can contribute
to victories in the war against the suffering of individual patients.
Here a great hospital is joined to a great medical school that
is itself part of a great scientific enterprise, recognizing no
boundaries among disciplines as it presses back the frontier of
our ignorance about what causes human suffering. That a physician
like Kurt Hecox brings to bear the disciplines of physics and
computer science in the effort to relieve uncontrollable seizures
in children is only one example of the spirit of the University
of Chicago, where research is pursued wherever it leads-where
the disciplinary structures of 19th-century German universities,
or even 20th-century American ones, are not allowed to stand in
the way of defeating ignorance.
That
suffering and ignorance should be the two great enemies of our
medical center is perhaps clear enough. We have only to rise continuously
to the challenge of ensuring that all of our resources-hospital,
medical school, and basic scientists from both the Biological
Sciences Division and the Physical Sciences Division-remain welded
together in a common pursuit. But aren't these the two great enemies
of everything the University does? And isn't the battle against
these two enemies one great battle that we daily prosecute across
all of our disciplines and interdisciplines?
Many
of the subjects that the social sciences engage are clearly at
the roots of human suffering. Extending our understanding of-battling
our ignorance about-how societies are organized, how economies
function, how humans develop over the course of their lives, even
how individuals and societies have behaved in the past could be
thought to provide some of the tools for preventing in the future
some of the suffering that we know of in the past and some of
the suffering that we see about us in the present. While the scholar's
daily battle against ignorance is not always directed at the immediate
relief of human suffering in the way that the physician-scientist's
is, without the social scientist's battle against ignorance, much
of human suffering that is beyond the reach of medicine will never
be conquered.
We
can take pride in the fact that the tradition of the social sciences
at the University of Chicago is rooted in the notion that the
City of Chicago would be its great laboratory and that the fruits
of its research would be returned to the city's citizens. While
our range is wider than the city limits, the city must always
remain bound to us as we are to it. Most important is that, just
as we do not recognize in our battle against ignorance the familiar
boundaries among disciplines as ways of knowing, neither do we
recognize an absolute cleavage between scholarship that is pure
and scholarship that is applied. This accounts for the numerous
criss-crossings among departments in the Social Sciences Division
and the Harris School of Public Policy, the School of Social Service
Administration, the Law School, the Graduate School of Business,
and the medical school. The same is true of the ways in which
the Biological Sciences Division and the Physical Sciences Division
have absorbed research and colleagues from what were once thought
of as engineering disciplines.
But
what could be said about suffering and ignorance as the enemies
of the humanities and the arts? This of course depends on what
is meant by suffering and ignorance. Are not the humanities, however,
engaged in extending our understanding of-combating our ignorance
about-what it means to be human? Are not the humanities and the
arts about the finding or creating of meaning where there might
otherwise be none? And, given a degree of physical and material
comfort, might not the greatest human suffering be the failure
to come to terms with what it means to be a human? The humanities
and the arts are often seen to provide mere entertainment or perhaps
so much as solace. But their subject is at the heart of what makes
life worth living. In that sense, they too are engaged in overcoming
ignorance and in so doing overcoming suffering.
As
a university we are committed to research and to the teaching,
in the broadest sense, of the fruits of that research. We pursue
learning for its own sake in whatever discipline. But ultimately
we do so because of the power of learning to liberate us from
suffering of whatever kind and to open for us the possibility
of a life truly worth living.
President
Don Michael Randel writes each issue on a topic of his choosing.-Ed.